The flexible deployment of perception and attention are essential for navigating daily life—it is therefore critical to understand the factors and situations that improve (or hinder) performance. Take, for example, driving a car; this commonplace human behavior requires processing complex dynamic streams of visual information that contain both relevant and irrelevant details, in service of producing adaptive behavior. However, the very nature of the task, down to which details are relevant, varies greatly between driving on an open country road vs. a gridlocked city street (current context), or between a novice and experienced driver (experience), or between an alert vs. fatigued individual (current state). The myriad of sources of variability create a challenge for delineating specific cognitive theories of behavior and, unfortunately, can limit the ability to translate lab-based studies to applied contexts. However, my research embraces this variability and quantifies the widespread and robust effects of experience and context on visual perception and attention, as well as the neural mechanisms underlying those effects. In addition, I use my research to directly aid in the application of cognitive psychology to real-world problems, by informing best practices in personal and professional settings (e.g., training strategies for airport baggage screeners), informing treatments for disorders and diseases where these processes go awry (e.g., face discrimination training to improve social outcomes among people with autism), and developing novel technologies (e.g., biologically-inspired computer vision algorithms).
I use an interdisciplinary approach in my research because I believe converging evidence from multiple disciplines and techniques is important for understanding the neural basis of behavior. I employ a combination of behavioral testing, EEG, data mining, and computational modeling to answer research questions that range from basic science (such as how is light on the retina transformed into meaningful representations of objects and categories in the visual system) to applied (such as what are the factors that make it harder to find cancer in a chest X-ray or illegal items in luggage at an airport security checkpoint).
He currently is currently accepting graduate student applications for the 2024 application cycle to start in the Fall 2025 semester